Bomb Hunters Read online

  The use of robots has also met with limited success in Helmand, because almost every piece of equipment used by bomb-hunting teams needs to be man-portable and the only robot light enough to be carried without a vehicle is the Dragon Slayer. Officially the MoD claims that the Dragon Slayer is a fantastic piece of equipment which will prove to be a huge aid to bomb-disposal teams and is the ‘best remote-controlled bomb disposal robot on the market’. But I have yet to come across an ATO who was impressed by the Dragon Slayer. Most complained that the device, which weighs 10 kg, often broke down or was too weak to pick up large quantities of explosives. On paper the idea of disposing of IEDs with robots is obviously the ideal solution, but the reality is different. A similar argument is used for the bomb suit, which is meant to protect bomb hunters from the effect of a blast. While it might be suitable in the relatively controlled environment of Northern Ireland, and to a certain extent Iraq, it is completely impractical in Afghanistan. ATOs need to be highly mobile. They need to be able to climb walls, crawl into culverts, and run for their lives when the Taliban attack – all of which are almost impossible while wearing a 50 kg bomb suit.

  The terrain and the distances IEDD teams need to travel also make the use of robots difficult. Most operators I met used robots at every appropriate opportunity, but those opportunities were few and far between and many teams never actually used robots on operations. In fact Badger never used a robot for any of the 139 bombs he defused during his six-month tour.

  ‘In an ideal world,’ Major Gould told me, ‘it would be better to deal with IEDs from 100 metres, by using robots and remote weapon systems, but the nature of the operation here means that cannot always be achieved. We have robots but they are of limited use if you have to climb over a 6ft wall to get into a compound where a bomb has been placed. Dealing with IEDs in Helmand without wearing a bomb suit, not being able to use your robots, is like going on a golf course with a seven iron and a putter – you can do it but it’s not very satisfactory. These days we would rather have a full set of golf clubs.’

  IEDs kill in various ways, depending on the type of charge, and in Afghanistan those are composed of artillery shells or mortar bombs filled with either military-grade explosive or home-made explosive. These devices have a high metal content and are relatively easy to discover by soldiers trained to use Vallons. When one is detonated the effect is similar to that of an artillery shell exploding and it often causes lethal fragmentation injuries. The effectiveness of the explosion and the range of the shrapnel are severely limited because the device is buried beneath the ground. To compensate for the limitations imposed by the need to conceal the bomb, the Taliban often use multiple mortar bombs or artillery shells.

  The other type of device which is now increasingly seen in Helmand is one where the main charge is usually home-made explosive concealed in a plastic container. The only metal content in these devices will be that used within the pressure plate, if one exists. For this reason they are much more difficult to detect, although not impossible. The containers typically contain 5, 10 or 20 kg of HME, but can be stacked in multiples to produce a bigger explosion. Any device with a charge of between 5 and 10 kg will take off a leg; 10 kg will take off both legs and most of a soldier’s behind. Anything larger will cause instant death. Soldiers who trigger these devices are killed or injured purely by the effect of the blast or by the pressure wave caused by the explosion, which is powerful enough to tear off one or more limbs. In some cases, especially if the bomb weighs more than 20 kg, the blast can blow a soldier to pieces. In Helmand there have been occasions whem only small body parts of soldiers have been found because they have been so close to the point of detonation. Many soldiers have also suffered severe blast wounds because they were close to a device when it exploded. In one example a soldier lost an arm and suffered severe blast injuries to the rest of his body after a colleague stepped on a pressure-plate IED. The soldier who triggered the device survived but lost both legs in the blast.

  Soldiers now accept that there is a high probability that they will be wounded by an IED, especially if they are based in areas such as Musa Qala and Sangin. They know that they might lose an arm or leg but also accept that, while such an injury may be life-changing, it need not diminish their quality of life. But the greatest fear which eats away at soldiers is the horrible prospect of losing their genitals in a blast. Human genitals are made from soft tissue and are easily damaged or blown off in an IED blast, especially when the explosion has already resulted in a traumatic amputation. Many soldiers privately told me that they would rather be dead than return to the UK without their testicles.

  ‘The first thing everybody checks after they have been blown up is their wedding tackle, that’s providing they are conscious,’ a soldier confided while we were chatting about the numerous threats they faced in Helmand. ‘Virtually the first thing a soldiers asks is, “Have I still got my bollocks?” It happens on the battlefield or in hospital. Nobody want to go home without their nuts – it’s a big topic of conversation among the soldiers. You will get guys asking, “What would you rather lose, your legs or your nuts?” There are some guys who’d prefer to lose both legs, both arms and be blind but still have their nuts. Others say if you don’t have any nuts you no longer have the urge for sex because you don’t have the right hormones in your blood, so if you do lose your nuts you won’t miss sex anyway. It’s all part of the reality of life in this fucked-up place.’

  Many other weapons will have a disproportionately greater effect when used in multiples. Here the Taliban subscribe to Aristotle’s dictum that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’, and this is precisely the case with IEDs. IEDs are used by the Taliban as a single bomb but it is when they are used in multiples that they have the greatest effect. The Taliban have learned to be meticulous in the planning of ambushes. After fours years of fighting the British, they are now able to predict, often with unerring accuracy, how troops will respond when ambushed. Insurgents are good students, always watching and learning. When a NATO soldier is seriously injured, the Taliban know that the standard operating procedure is to call for a helicopter evacuation. For the aircraft to land safely, space and flat ground are needed. So what better place to plant several more IEDs than an obvious helicopter landing site?

  The Taliban know that soldiers will rush to the aid of a colleague who may be, say, a triple amputee and bleeding to death. Soldiers being soldiers, they may well disregard the threat to them and not clear a safe route to a casualty in order to provide life-saving first aid. Such blind loyalty among the British troops has often been exploited by the Taliban, with the consequence that those who have rushed to help a stricken comrade have ended up as casualties themselves.

  As one soldier put it, ‘It’s easy to lose your head and forget your drills when your best mate has had both legs blown off and is screaming in agony. We have had to drum it into soldiers to make sure they always clear a safe lane when going to an injured colleague. Where there is one device there are often more.’

  Over lunch in one of the many tented canteens dotted about Camp Bastion, I ponder over what Major Gould has told me. Only now am I really starting to understand the sheer enormity of the task facing the bomb hunters. On paper the odds look stacked against any of them surviving a six-month tour, but bomb hunters are a breed apart – not that they will tell you that. The most effective weapons they have in their armoury are training, skill and courage, but also luck, and of that they will need bucketloads.

  British troops are monitored by the enemy’s ‘scrutiny screen’ of various degrees of sophistication practically every time they leave a base. In some areas, such as Sangin, the monitoring, or ‘dicking’ as the soldiers call it, is very sophisticated. Dicking is often conducted by young men, sometimes boys just 10 years old, armed only with a mobile phone, who report directly back to the local Taliban commander, and all for a few dollars a day. Soldiers are dicked when they cross obstacles, search VPs, chat to locals
, when they enter compounds and when they leave compounds. With such a vast network of willing assistants the Taliban could monitor the movement of British troops all day every day.

  ‘Everything we do is watched by the Taliban in Sangin,’ Captain Rob Swan, the commander of Brimstone 31, one of the ATOs working with the Task Force, explained to me while we were relaxing in the Joint Force EOD Group’s ‘bar’ – a large tent with a television and armchairs but no alcohol.

  ‘The Taliban are well aware that if one of their devices is found, then it is highly likely that an ATO is going to be almost certainly called in to defuse it, especially if the device is in an area used by ISAF. So we get called in and basically the Taliban will sit and watch from a distance. He will watch every move, every procedure, every action I make.’ Captain Swan smiles and shrugs. ‘And there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t stop them, we all know they are doing it. It’s infuriating watching them sitting with their backs against a compound wall 40–50 metres away, just watching what the operator is doing. They will watch what actions I carry out on that device and they will try to think of ways to catch me out. They will look at areas I may or may not have searched. And you know they are thinking: he didn’t search there – maybe I should place an IED in that area. So I have to be very careful all the time, constantly changing my drills and making sure I don’t set patterns – it’s basically a game of chess with serious consequences for the loser. I always have to stay one step ahead. It’s cat and mouse.’

  Rob Swan and his team had been sent to Afghanistan as BCRs. The team consisted of Corporal Kelly O’Connor, at that time the only female No. 2 in Helmand, Lance Corporal Sebastian Aprea, 24, the specialist electronics operator, and Ranger Charlie Clark, 27, a reservist serving with the London Regiment (TA) who in civilian life was a tree surgeon but in Helmand was the infantry escort and therefore responsible for covering Captain Swan’s back while he was defusing bombs.

  In the weeks before Christmas one ATO had been killed and two had been injured, one severely. Three separate attacks had reduced the CIED Task Force’s bomb-disposal capability to 30 per cent, exposing the fragility of the JFEOD Group. Replacements were urgently needed.

  Rob, Kelly and Seb had all trained together on the High Threat course a few months earlier and had expected to deploy to Helmand in March 2010. But, following a run of casualties, the order came through that the team should expect to move at short notice and the three eventually flew out on 16 December 2009. Shortly after they arrived, Charlie, the fourth member of the team, turned up.

  ‘Being deployed as a BCR wasn’t something that really played on my mind,’ added Rob as we chatted in a rare moment of inactivity while his team relaxed while on standby for the High Readiness Force. ‘In fact coming out early was a bit of a bonus – the sooner you come out the sooner you get home, and my wife is seventeen weeks pregnant so I really want to be home in time for the birth of the baby.’

  ‘Yeah,’ interjects Kelly, ‘we were just keen to get out here. Better than sitting on our arses back in the UK.’ The other three members of the team all nod in agreement.

  Rob joined the Army in 2003 and after leaving Sandhurst a year later was commissioned into the Royal Logistic Corps. He says he had a vague understanding of the nature of bomb disposal but it wasn’t until he was deployed to Iraq in 2005, when he was attached to the Light Dragoons battlegroup, that he became interested in joining the profession. ‘I volunteered to be an escort for an ATO who’d been tasked with defusing a device which had been taken into a police station by an Iraqi police officer who had found it on a bridge. I watched the ATO at work and I found it really intriguing, so when I returned to the UK I did a bit more research and found out about the course. As far as the RLC is concerned, it was a bit more of the pointy end of the sword, so I volunteered for the course.’

  Seb, the Royal Signals specialist electronics operator, is 24 and is chatty, personable and intelligent. He studied science subjects at A-level, gaining an A and two Bs. ‘I thought about going to university but the Army seemed to be a better deal,’ he tells me with a broad, youthful smile across his face. ‘You get paid to learn and the stuff I’m learning at the moment is pretty much degree level. By the time I have finished my training I will get a Master’s – it’s all degree-level physics. So it’s the same thing as being at university except I’m being paid for it and I’m doing something beneficial for others.’

  Seb, who possesses a maturity beyond his years, says he was happy to face the risks that come with being a member of a bomb-disposal team because he believes such a dangerous and demanding job will ultimately assist him in his progress within the Army. He explains, ‘This is regarded as quite a prestigious posting for my trade and usually only the top 1 or 2 per cent of each course get selected. I did pretty well in training, I joined up in March 2007, so I’ve only been in three years. This is my first posting. I went to speak to my troop warrant officer and told him I was interested in going into EOD. I knew it would be good for my career. He made the phone calls and I asked to go to Catterick because it is quite close to where I live and I would be able to see my mum. My mum is threaders at the moment, though. Every time I phone she is in tears. She worries a lot. I try and tell her I’m OK but she still worries.’

  One of the most testing days of Brimstone 31’s tour took place in early March 2010 in Sangin. Taliban activity in the area was at an all-time high. Almost every patrol from one of the numerous British-occupied bases in the area was subject to some form of attack and the casualty rate was going through the roof. For most of 2009 and half of 2010 the mission in Sangin was to simply contain the Taliban, and the plan to bring security and prosperity was a slow, difficult and often bloody process. Schools were opening and there was more activity in the bazaar which ran through the centre of the town. But security for Afghan civilians had been paid for with the blood of young British soldiers, and the sacrifices being demanded of them were becoming increasingly questionable. Between October 2009 and April 2010, the 3 Rifles battlegroup, which was composed of 1,500 troops from a number of different units, suffered the worst casualties of any British unit involved in the Afghan War to date. More than thirty soldiers were killed and over 200 were injured. Battles would occur almost every day, occasionally several times a day, and the population, whose hearts and minds the British were trying to win, were often caught in the middle. Sangin remains a complex environment where the Alikozai tribesman fears murder if he shops with an Ishakzai trader. It is a society riven with tribal infighting, drugs and corruption, as well as the insurgency, and caught in the middle were the British.

  The troops of A Company, 4 Rifles were warned in early 2009 that they would be needed to support the 3 Rifles battlegroup for the winter tour of October 2009 to March 2010. News that the company would be based at FOB Inkerman was met with some relief. Every soldier in the British Army was aware of Sangin’s reputation as a graveyard.

  FOB Inkerman is the outermost of the many patrol bases which satellite the town of Sangin, and it sits in the edge of Route 611, around 8 km north of the town. Since it was first occupied by the Grenadier Guards in June 2007, barely a day has passed in which troops based there have not been involved in fighting. Inkerman was established with the primary function of interdicting the movement of insurgents into the town, a tactic which had met with some success. The Taliban had responded by seeding the route between Sangin and Inkerman with IEDs, making travel almost impossible for locals, the British, and anyone else.

  Because resupplying the FOB via Route 611 was becoming increasingly difficult, in October 2009 A Company attempted to establish a new resupply route through the desert over a distance of about 8 km. The bomb-hunting team charged with clearing the route was led by Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid, but it proved to be a tortuous and difficult undertaking. Within hours of leaving Inkerman they discovered a run of six IEDs. Progress almost ground to a halt as banks after banks of IEDs were encountered. The mission took eight day
s to complete and it was immediately clear that resupplying Inkerman via the desert was unsustainable.

  Within weeks of arriving, A Company suffered one of its darkest periods when two 20-year-olds, Rifleman Philip Allen and Rifleman Samuel Bassett, were killed on 7 and 8 November respectively. Both soldiers were killed by IEDs during routine patrols in the Inkerman area. Rifleman Bassett was killed while clearing a route to resupply one of the small patrol bases in the area. He was at the front of the patrol, clearing the way with a Vallon, when he stepped on a device. The blast resulted in a double amputation, but although Bassett survived the initial blast and remained conscious throughout the casualty evacuation he later died in hospital, such was the severity of his wounds.

  An American Task Force Thor route-clearance team also attempted to clear Route 611 by detonating scores of IEDs as their heavily armoured vehicles drove along the road between Sangin and Inkerman. While Task Force Thor’s vehicles managed to eradicate pressure-plate IEDs, they had no effect at all on command-wire IEDs, a fact which was discovered when a massive 150 lb bomb detonated beneath a Mastiff carrying six British troops. Everyone in the vehicle survived, but the commander, a young lieutenant, lost a foot in the blast.

  Even after the route had been cleared, the Taliban soon returned and began burying even more IEDs, by locating blind spots which could not be monitored by the British and by using children to bury devices.

  Brigadier James Cowan, the commander of 11 Light Brigade, and Lieutenant Colonel Nick Kitson, the commander of the 3 Rifles battlegroup, in conjunction with Major Richard Streatfield, the officer commanding A Company, decided that the only alternative was to try to secure Route 611 by occupying a series of compounds adjacent to the road. The operation was launched shortly before Christmas 2009, and by early January a total of nine compounds and patrol bases had been created.